Open-source shopping carts provide you the greatest control and flexibility in implementing your cart. Open-source doesn’t necessarily mean free; only that you have access to the underlying source code. With open-source, your initial costs to implement tend to be higher, but your long-term operating costs tend to be lower.

CartSpan offers direct integration with your Amazon Seller Account to retrieve orders and update stock using quantities represented in your Sage 50 U.S. accounting system. If you are using a competitive product, CartSpan has the potential to save you thousands of dollars per year, offers more nuanced imports to support your unique business process, and maintains Amazon stock listings more accurately. In essence, CartSpan is BETTER, FASTER, and CHEAPER than the competition.

Powerful features you didn’t know you needed…

In addition to the standard capabilities of CartSpan that can be found HERE, the following Amazon-specific features are designed to make your life easier and provide a better shopping experience for your customers:

Factoring of FBA inventory when publishing stock availability – CartSpan will exclude the stock held in Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses (FBA) when pushing stock availability to your individual shopping cart as well as your FBM (Fulfill By Merchant) account. For instance, if you have 100 ‘widgets’ in the accounting system, and 10 of those are sitting in Amazon warehouses, then CartSpan will push a stock availability value of 90 to your shopping cart and the FBM (Fulfill By Merchant) record for that item. This more accurate representation of inventory greatly reduces (or eliminates) having to explain to customers why you are unable to fulfill their order.

Easy cross-referencing utility – CartSpan allows you to create a direct cross-reference of your Amazon SKUs with your internal accounting items. This may seem like a common-sense program functions, but many third party Cloud/SAAS-based (Software As A Service) offerings require a third level of reference to support their program function.

Fewer disruptions during imports – CartSpan allows a “Dummy” item assignment as an option when no cross-reference with an accounting item can be found. This is essentially a placeholder item that allows the imports to keep ‘churning’ and the unrecognized SKU can be resolved concurrently. The item in-question is clearly prefixed to the product description to support this corrective action and support fulfillment activities.

Tax Rollback for jurisdictions in which Amazon collects and remits taxes – With tax laws evolving as they have, Amazon now collects and remits taxes on behalf of the merchant for transactions occurring in many states. While this portion of the transaction has been effectively handled by Amazon on its side, the amount of the tax is still exposed on the API (Application Programming Interface) response and must be handled during the integration…or not. Many basic integrations don’t know what to do with this as the tax in-question is now of little interest to the merchant within their accounting system. CartSpan offers provisions for identifying these affected tax jurisdictions and adjusting the transaction values as if the tax ‘never happened.’ The net-effect of this feature is a smoother integration with fewer requirements to manually edit transactions to support the import.

Make better deals with Many-to-One item mapping – CartSpan allows you to configure multi-pack options in Amazon that can be converted to an ‘Each’ based line item during the import. These items configured in Amazon need not exist in the accounting system. For instance, if you wish to offer a ’widget-12-pack’ in Amazon, you can indicate in the CartSpan configuration that this individual item should be converted to a line-item of ‘widget’ with a quantity of 12. Furthermore, if you wish to offer the ‘widget-12-pack’ at a collective price that is lower than list price, CartSpan will appropriately allocate the discount to the price during the import.

More G/L account options for imports – Many competitive integrations will lock you into standard GL (General Ledger) accounts for all imports. For starters, CartSpan recognizes the GL Sales, Inventory, and Cost-of-Goods-Sold (COGS) at the individual item level during the imports. Only if you desire to assign all sales to a single GL Sales account would make the configuration. This configurable aspect of the import allows merchants to better utilize stock accounting reports for reporting profitability of individual product lines. Additionally, Amazon allows the levy of a ‘gift wrap’ fee for an item. CartSpan will allow you to direct the fee to a separate ‘Handling’ account for tracking.

More timely updates by synchronizing stock/orders at higher frequencies – The ‘Basic’ plans of competitive integrations, who’s prices are anywhere from 200-600% higher than CartSpan, DO NOT even support inventory updates and only synchronize orders once per day. If you are running FBA, CartSpan allows inventory synchronization every 30 minutes; more frequently if not. CartSpan allows order download from Amazon (and your shopping cart) every 15 minutes or on-demand. If you want increased synchronization frequencies and inventory management, competitors force you to upgrade to their premium plans, which then start to approach the cost of college tuition.

One reason that CartSpan can offer better synchronization frequencies is that our software communicates directly with your Amazon Seller account via your desktop and not via a third-party server that ‘meters’ your activity and tracks the number of orders you take. CartSpan doesn’t care how many orders you take or the transactional value of those orders.

CartSpan’s fixed price implementation is the most transparent in the market at $295 (US) initially with $495 annual maintenance starting after the first year. Initial license fee is not paid until after the 10-day trial. Annual maintenance includes upgrades supporting new versions of Sage 50 and post-installation support. Please see the ‘Post-Installation Support’ section on the base-licensing page for details regarding what this covers.

New accounts also require payment of the CartSpan base-license fee and annual maintenance for which the details can be found here. Note that the CartSpan base-license includes connectivity to one of the many eCommerce shopping cart platforms supported.

Relative to competitive offerings, CartSpan represents a remarkable value. The total annual cost of CartSpan is often the amount that competitors charge on a monthly basis…for less functionality!

Need a powerful testimonial? Take it from one of our raving Customers…

“Garage Flooring of Colorado started using CartSpan in 2015. We received multiple bids for tens of thousands of dollars to integrate our accounting system with our Magento shopping cart. CartSpan was able to do it for hundreds as opposed to thousands of dollars.

Shortly after launching with CartSpan, we started using another software provider to integrate our Amazon orders with our shopping cart. It was very complicated, we spent thousands in setup fees, and it took months to integrate. We were paying about $1,000 per month for the ongoing use of the software.

Last year (2018), Scott Wheeler contacted Garage Flooring about the Amazon add-on for the CartSpan product. When he told me what the pricing was going to be, I was floored. Setup took hours, not months, and our costs were hundreds – per year – instead of huge setup fees and large monthly fees. It is hands down the simplest integration we have ever seen.

Perhaps the best part is the service we receive from CartSpan. If there is an issue, they are always very willing to help us get it fixed. It is flat out the best technical support we have ever received.

Internally, the software has paid for itself dozens of time over. It has reduced errors, increased efficiency, and decreased the need for order processing staff by 33% — don’t worry, we just put that staff in other departments so we could grow.